by Celia Laskey
Not so long ago I was in Brooklyn, where I was born and raised and stayed. I was working as a research associate for Acceptance Across America, mostly analyzing and reporting on survey data. I should have been in a much higher position for my age, but I graduated high school in 1982, just when AIDS was starting to rear its head. It was hard to see the point in going to college, let alone pursuing a career, when you might not live to see the fruition of any of it. So I bartended and temped and did all kinds of menial jobs while the men around me disappeared, then in the late eighties I started to get involved with ACT UP. I mostly did policy and medical research that I was utterly unequipped for, but I taught myself a lot and told myself that if I survived, I’d go to college and pursue research as a career. Fast-forward to a few months ago, when I kept asking AAA for a promotion to senior research associate, which meant I’d get to conceptualize, design, and conduct unique research projects. When they told me I finally got the job, there was one large catch—I’d have to move to Big Burr to do the research on the ground.
The charter school where Miguel taught literature had recently closed, and he couldn’t find another job. We were barely making ends meet. The lease was up on our apartment in Ditmas Park, and we’d have to move to Coney Island to find the same rent. Two years in Kansas, to catch our breath and improve our finances, didn’t sound so bad at the time. But now that we’ve been here for four and a half months, I know exactly how long a day can feel.
Miguel comes into the kitchen and follows my lead, taking the whiskey out of the cabinet and pouring an inch in a glass. “Don’t even say it.”
I hold up my hands in surrender. He takes a sip, then leans his body into me, threading his fingers through mine. He looks into my eyes intently. His deep brown irises have lightened and taken on a green hint, something I haven’t noticed before. The green creeps in from the edges of his pupils, like algae in a pond.
“I know what you’re thinking.” He pulls away and tips his head back, drinking half the whiskey in his glass.
I’m thinking that when you’re young, it never occurs to you that part of love, part of sharing your life with another person, includes the shitty things. Like compromising on where to live, needing a third person in your bed to be able to fuck each other, or inviting an aging parent into your house. Then suddenly you’re fifty-three, and it feels like love is mostly those things. “I’m thinking how, thirty years ago, we would have bet someone a thousand dollars our life wouldn’t be this,” I say.
“A thousand dollars would have been all our savings back then. Which apartment were we living in?”
“Dean Street, above the barbershop and below the bowling ball family. Where Barclays Center is now.”
“That fucking place.” He lets out a half laugh. “Remember the night you banged on the ceiling with the broom handle so hard you made a hole? And two dead mice fell out.”
I shudder, remembering the mice hitting my neck like furry hacky-sack balls. “I think that was the worst apartment we ever had.”
“But we were happy,” says Miguel.
We exchange smiles—weak ones, like tea bags that have already been used once and barely color the water.
Miguel opens the fridge. “Dinner?”
“I got an eggplant and some fresh mozzarella yesterday,” I say. “Eggplant parm?”
He gives me a little grimace. “Dad says eggplant tastes like a dirty dish sponge. I’ll run to the store and get something he likes.”
I look down the hallway toward Arturo’s room. Even though I’ve been with Miguel for thirty years, Arturo still doesn’t feel like family. When Miguel came out to him, he said, “Well, okay, then. What’s for lunch?” After that, they never spoke about it again. The first time I went home with Miguel he introduced me simply as David, and after a few visits I think Arturo understood I would keep coming back. At holidays and reunions, he tolerates me the way you would a persistent bunion on your foot: you’d prefer it wasn’t there, but you can live with it. To be fair, I guess I feel the same way toward him. But the thought of having to interact with him on my own makes my lungs clench.
“I can go to the store,” I say through a strangled breath.
“You don’t know all his little quirks. There’s a lot of stuff he doesn’t like.”
“Great.”
Miguel gives me an exhausted look and finishes the whiskey in his glass.
“What am I supposed to do if he needs something?”
He gives me an even more exhausted look. I wonder sometimes why he hasn’t left me. Once, years ago, after I berated him for giving ten dollars to a homeless drunk, he told me I had “zero empathy.” He took it back later, but I knew he had meant it.
He walks out of the kitchen, his keys jingling. The front door slams, and I’m terrified it might have woken Arturo. I stand absolutely still, holding my breath and listening for a sound from down the hall. It’s not that Arturo is so terrible. But it’s like having a roommate when you thought you’d never have a roommate again. When you need to shit, someone’s in the bathroom. You can’t knock on the door and say hurry up, I’ve gotta go. You just stand in the hallway doing ass-Kegels, cursing humanity. When you want to watch trashy reality TV, guess who’s already on the couch drinking your beers, the game only in the first quarter.
A few years ago, Miguel and I decided to stop traveling for Christmas. We decided it would be a day for us, without any airports or useless gifts or pretending to think our relatives’ insufferable children were cute. I’m sure our now-normal routine of bingeing western movies and cooking Indian food is a thing of the past, because guess who doesn’t like Indian food.
I realize, with a start, that this will be even worse than having a roommate. At least roommates are self-sufficient. Arturo will need care and looking after, like a baby. I never wanted anything remotely close to a baby, not even a cat or a dog or a hamster. I repeat to myself, There is nothing obstructing your airways, there is nothing obstructing your airways. In the middle of the kitchen I start doing jumping jacks, my mother’s cure for panic attacks.
The first time one happened, I was thirteen, on the way to my first soccer match of the year. I was the goalie. As I pictured a succession of checkered balls flying just past my gloves and hitting the white netting of the goal, I told my mother I couldn’t breathe. She pulled the minivan into a Dairy Queen parking lot and told me to do jumping jacks. When I looked at her like she was insane, she started doing them with me. After about twenty seconds, the air flowed freely. My mother smiled, drumming her fake pink nails on her hip, and said, “Told you.”
“Miguel!”
I stop my jumping jacks, hoping I’ve only imagined Arturo calling for Miguel. But then I hear it again, his trembling voice insistent, like he’s being held off the edge of a cliff. I sigh and walk down the hallway to his door. Steeling myself, I knock, then push the door open.
“Oh, it’s you,” Arturo says. He’s propped up in bed on one of those backrest pillows with arms, wearing a pair of blue striped pajamas that look brand new, the collar stiff at his neck, the fold lines still crisp. The dog lies next to him under the covers with his head on the pillow. Orange pill bottles make a miniature skyline on the bedside table. A black-and-white photo of Miguel’s mom and Arturo standing in front of a vintage Chevy truck leans against the windowsill, in a tacky gold frame. Miguel’s mom left when he was three, and he never heard from her again. Arturo never got over it, and it was up to Miguel to take care of his dad after that.
“Miguel went to the store to get something you’ll like for dinner,” I say.
“Oh.” He glances down at the blanket and smooths it. His hands look like they’ve been vacuum-sealed, the veins and tendons making valleys of his wrinkled skin. “Never mind, then.”
“Is there anything I can get you?”
“No,” he says, peering at the semi-closed door like I’m lying abo
ut Miguel being gone. He clasps his shaking hands in his lap. I picture him lying on his kitchen floor for two whole days, his cheek pressed against spotted pea-green linoleum, watching the sunlight slide across the countertops and fade into darkness, having to piss and shit himself and knowing that either someone would find him lying in a puddle of his own feculence, or he would die that way. I try not to think about who will take care of me when I’m old. I like to imagine myself just falling over one day after a long life of perfect health. I wouldn’t have to ask any favors and no one would be inconvenienced. If only we could all be so lucky.
I tell Arturo to let me know if he changes his mind about needing anything, then I gently shut the door behind me. I grab another beer from the fridge and take it to the couch, where I open up Grindr. I wait for the grid of pictures to load, hoping for someone new while knowing that, in a town with a population of ten thousand, that’s about as likely as a flying pig. We haven’t found someone in months.
I scroll through a smattering of familiar six-packs, each muscle like a dinner roll you could pick up and wolf down, mirror selfies cut off at the neck, and boxer-brief close-ups. Gay men in small Kansas towns aren’t going to risk showing their faces. There are five guys within a few miles—three of them have the thin, lanky bodies of high school students. The rest are at least thirty miles away.
Then I spot the flying pig: a guy I haven’t seen before, with a trimmed beard and camo boxers. The top of the photo is cut off just below his nose and the bottom of the photo ends at his groin. Though he’s not very muscular, he’s also not overweight, and he has nice, full lips. I picture his mouth covering my cock while Miguel sticks a finger up my ass. His profile name is G, and he’s tagged his position as “versatile” and his tribe as “discreet.” He’s only two miles away, which means that he’s in Big Burr. I send him a message asking if he wants to meet up tonight, and he says, Maybe. Check back in a few hours. When I return to the grid of pictures and try to scroll down, there aren’t any more. Fucking Kansas.
Living here has essentially forced Miguel and me into monogamy, which these days just means abstinence. The last time we slept with only each other must have been the eighties, when sex with strangers became a flirtation with death. It wasn’t until the mid-nineties, when some of us started feeling like we might actually live to see old age, that Miguel and I started to sleep with other people. We finally felt safe enough to admit we were a little bored. First we had sex separately, never revealing the details to each other but promising to be careful. Soon there was too much we couldn’t say. I started getting paranoid that Miguel wasn’t just having sex but a full-fledged relationship, and when I finally asked him about it he said he had been thinking the same thing about me. We agreed to never have sex without each other again. Over the years we honed the rules: three-ways only, no friends, no repeats, no overnights, no anal, no one with tribal tattoos, never in our bed, only when we both approved of the guy, and if one of us ever started to feel uncomfortable, we’d talk about it.
Miguel’s car pulls into the driveway and I close Grindr. I turn the TV on to a Folgers commercial. A young daughter gives her father a WORLD’S GREATEST DAD mug for Christmas, then the ad flashes forward to the daughter, now older, giving her graying father a WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDPA mug. I cringe.
Miguel walks in with two grocery bags, looking annoyed. “I was going to make posole, but of course they didn’t have any hominy. So I got stuff for carne adovada.” He unloads groceries in the kitchen, raising his voice over the TV. “Thank god I still have that stash of dried chiles. Remember when you told me not to pack them?” If there was a fire in the house and Miguel could take only two things with him, it would be his dried chiles and his western DVD collection.
I turn up the TV volume even though I’m not listening. Miguel stands in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, watching me. I know he’s waiting for me to be his sous chef, but I’m still annoyed about the eggplant parm we won’t be eating anytime soon. I don’t feel like New Mexican food. If I’m honest, I barely ever feel like New Mexican food—except for sopapillas, which are really just vehicles for honey. He turns around and goes back into the kitchen, and I think I’ve won, until he calls out twenty seconds later, “Would you like to help me?”
I push myself off the couch and follow Miguel to the kitchen. He stands over the food processor, dumping in unmeasured amounts of dried coriander, oregano, and rehydrated red chiles. Two onions, a knife, and a cutting board sit on the island waiting for me. “Why do I always have to cut the onions?” I ask, feeling like a petulant teenager.
“Stop being such a cabrón.” He pours honey into the food processor, wipes the lip of the jar with his finger, and holds it in front of my face. I remember a night forever ago, when we had only been dating for a few months, when he did the same thing. He had just made me my first sopapillas, and as I licked off the honey, circling my tongue around the tip of his finger, I watched him get hard in his jeans. He coated my lips in honey and kissed it off. He poured honey into his hand, a thick ribbon that coalesced into a sensuous pool, and enveloped my cock with it. He drizzled honey on my ass and lapped it off. Honey ended up in every crevice of our bodies. We had to peel the sheets off our sticky skin, our body hair matted.
I open my mouth and close it around his finger, but it just feels sticky, not sexual. I wonder whether to fake it, act like it’s turning me on, but when I look at Miguel, his lips are pressed together and he’s looking over my shoulder. When he really likes something, he makes a deep moan that almost sounds like a snore. He goes to the sink and washes his hands, and I go back to chopping the onion.
“What do you think about meeting up with someone tonight?”
He turns around and squints at me. “Seriously?”
“It’s the first time in ages I’ve seen someone new on Grindr.” I run my finger along the blade of the knife to release the curved squares of onion clinging there.
“I didn’t know you were still looking.”
“It’s been a really long time. I think we need this.”
“It’s my father’s first night in our house, and all you can think about is finding someone to suck you off?” He takes the pork out of the refrigerator and throws it onto a cutting board, the pink meat slapping against the plastic.
“I just don’t know when there’ll be another opportunity.”
“Then you should go by yourself.” He says it with no discernible tone, his back to me. His tricep flexes as he chops the pork into neat cubes.
“But that’s against the rules.”
He scoffs. “Because the rules have been working so well for us.”
I’ve finished dicing the onions into a sad, jagged snowbank. “You wouldn’t be jealous?”
He puts down the knife and sets his palms on the edges of the countertop. His back rises and expands as he takes a deep breath. “You were supposed to say you don’t want to go without me.”
I throw my hands up. “Then you shouldn’t say things you don’t mean.”
Miguel takes a pan out of the cabinet beneath the counter and places it on the stove. He fills it with a few glugs of oil and turns the burner on. “You should go,” he says, his back to me.
“Tonight, or now?”
When he finally turns around, he looks like he’s just gotten off a long flight and I’m the last person he wants to see. “Either.” He turns back and drops cubes of pork into the hot oil.
If his father wasn’t here, we wouldn’t be fighting. I turn and walk out of the house. I get in the car and head toward the Cinephile, figuring an insipid blockbuster will be good for shutting off my brain. The sun is setting, wedging directly between the two grain silos in the field across the street. Beams of light shoot across them like spokes of a wheel. At a four-way stop, the car next to me is full of teenagers singing and car-dancing. I want to follow them, unroll my window, and yell, “Do
you know what your lives will become?” The houses get closer together and suburbia flashes by: a man in a plaid jacket tosses a garbage bag into a trash can, a woman unloads groceries from the trunk of her silver SUV, kids bundled in down jackets kick a partly deflated soccer ball across their yard.
I turn onto Main Street, passing the remains of our billboard. Someone tried to burn it down a couple months ago, but they only managed to incinerate the bottom of it, up to the women’s calves—the top just melted, disfiguring the women’s faces as if they had literally walked through fire. I imagine the people of Big Burr forcing the women to walk through flames to prove their love for each other. Their scorched feet and clasped hands make them look like some kind of gay warriors—maybe a more fitting image than the one we used originally. The cops say they can’t let us put up a new billboard because the burned one is part of an active investigation, although I have serious doubts about how active it really is.
I pull into the parking lot of the Cinephile. Two movies are on the marquee: Love Is Blind, a rom-com about a woman who falls in love with a blind man, and Ramsey & Robot, a futuristic buddy-cop movie. I buy a ticket for Love Is Blind and check my phone to see if Miguel has texted me. He hasn’t.
I choose a seat in the back row, one in from the end, and drape my jacket over the seat next to me like I’m waiting for someone. Women wearing those terrible boots that look like slippers and sweaters that look like bathrobes sit in small clusters, each with their own large bucket of popcorn. A teenage guy sits dutifully next to his girlfriend, holding her hand with one hand, scrolling through his phone with the other. A young mother shushes her toddler as he sings some nonsense song, his mouth full of neon candy. From the opposite end of the back row, two women slide in and sit in the middle. One of them opens a bag of gummy bears and places an orange one on the other woman’s knee. She walks the candy slowly up the woman’s thigh until the other woman swats it off and places the gummy bear in her mouth, looking around guiltily, as if to make sure no one has seen. The women then get into a hushed argument that ends with a furtive yet ardent kiss. As the lights dim for the previews, I take out my phone to text Miguel, Omg I’m sitting next to covert Big Burr lesbians, before I remember we’re in a fight.